You can enter and view thousands of characters from most of the world's writing systems, even those not found on your keyboard. This page lists some different ways you can enter special characters.
GNOME comes with a character map application that allows you to browse all the characters in Unicode. Use the character map to find the character you want, and then copy and paste it to wherever you need it.
You can find
A compose key is a special key that allows you to press multiple keys
in a row to get a special character. For example, to type the accented
letter é, you can press
Keyboards don't have specific compose keys. Instead, you can define one of the existing keys on your keyboard as a compose key.
Open the
Click on
Select the
Click on
Click on
You can type many common characters using the compose key, for example:
Press
Press
Press
Press
For more compose key sequences, see the compose key page on Wikipedia.
You can enter any Unicode character using only your keyboard with the
numeric code point of the character. Every character is identified by a
four-character code point. To find the code point for a character, find the
character in the character map application and look in the status bar or the
To enter a character by its code point, hold down
You can make your keyboard behave like the keyboard for another language, regardless of the letters printed on the keys. You can even easily switch between different keyboard layouts using an icon in the top bar. To learn how, see .
An Input Method expands the previous methods by allowing to enter characters not only with keyboard but also any input devices. For instance you could enter characters with a mouse using a gesture method, or enter Japanese characters using a Latin keyboard.
To choose an input method, right-click over a text widget, and in the menu